Thursday, July 6

The tales of a casual games designer: Part 2

Well, I have over 300 views of my First Past The Post entry on BGG and although my own views are in the tens, it means other people ARE looking! Hopefully a percentage will be happy to print it out and give it a try. Anyways, my reason for print and play for this game are numerous but mainly because I see the game as a light filler, the first 'proper' game I've looked at developing and have completed, and one that I AM proud of, but know that it can probably be tested, tried and feedback left. Something I HAVE spoken with my wife about (who'd be much happier if my games invention turned into income, however miserly the amount) is going the whole print and sell approach myself - printing as required on decent quality card with a good finish and put into a well made and printed box. Of course I need a better printer to do that, but if it's a possibility who knows. I think as more games come from my brain, there will at least be one that I think "Oooooh this is it!" in which case I'll look to playtest and then approach a company to produce, although of course games chosen are few, and income for the designer can be very low anyways. My boardgames club was chosen to playtest a game on the verge of full scale production last week and apaprantly it was extremely average. Yeah yeah, there's joy in having a game produced and sold for you, but I want to be PROUD of it, and these first few games I see as paving the way for future successes and while I love First Past The Post and enjoy playing it, I feel there are better games within me.

2 comments:

Jackson Pope said...

Luke, I think the views on BGG are individual accounts, so all of your views count as 1! Which means over 300 different people have seen it. I'm still waiting to play - I've downloaded it and read the rules once, but I'm looking forward to it.

Anonymous said...

I know what you mean about getting the "right" idea. I used to joke that I had finally passed my "bad games" phase, had entered my "average games" phase and aspired to the "quite good" phase. My backlist of designs has now reached 30, and of those, I think about 3 of them are good enough for strangers to play :-) Most of the others were perfectly decent, but didn't offer anything special. Then again, that would cover most games that are published!